You’ve already seen the statistics – total B2B eCommerce sales worldwide will reach $6.7 trillion by 2020, while 89% of B2B clients conduct their inquiry using the Internet.

There’s no doubt that a B2B eCommerce solution is essential if you want your company to stay relevant and competitive.

However, you may still question if it’s worth the efforts and investment to build a B2B eCommerce portal with all the whistles and bells. You wanted to see a return on investment (ROI) in the form of enhanced revenue and decreased the cost to make sure you’re making a smart business settlement.

To drive you over the barrier, here are the four best ways a B2B eCommerce portal can help you boost profit:

Decrease Customer Service Costs

A B2B eCommerce portal allows customers to access product information such as pricing, specifications, and real-time availability online while minimizing call volume to your customer service staff and lessening the workload of the customer support team so you can visibly lower your sales cost.

Besides, a B2B eCommerce portal with order and inventory management functionalities allows customers to self-serve instead of having to call customer service.

 

Expand Customer Base and Increase Sales With Greater Exposure

A B2B eCommerce portal lets you to effectively service customers from different geographic areas or time zones as they can set their orders when they’re working, not only on your business hours.

This added benefit can help increase sales and revenue from global customers – an essential place of growth for many B2B businesses. Being able to set an order at a time available for the clients makes it more likely that they’d purchase from you.

An online presence also enables your potential buyers to find your business via search, giving you the ability to get in front of new customers outside of your crucial geographic area so you can reach possibilities nationally and internationally.

To reach a global influence with your online presence, you need to drive traffic to your website, and this can be performed using a mixture of tactics such as website SEO, content marketing, and pay-per-click ads.

 

Create an Interactive Experience To Increase Purchases

A B2B eCommerce portal lets you create interactive experiences that will make better relationships, and ultimately maximize conversion.

Website visitors are 64-85% more likely to buy after watching a product video. You can enhance your sales and profits by integrating demo videos into your product pages to showcase how your products work.

Alternatively, giving 360-degree views of your products with high-quality photos can accomplish similar results.

You can also include advanced elements, such as a detailed product description, so visitors can follow their orders fast and efficiently without having to call the client service office and without wasting time to inform every detail for a client.

 

Streamline Ordering and Re-Ordering

A B2B eCommerce portal enables clients to place their orders any time during the day, any day of the week.

With online access, existing clients can immediately access their order history and re-order items. You can facilitate re-ordering by adding a feature that lists out past purchases so clients can find the products they want to re-order fast and efficiently.

You can further personalize the user experience by displaying pricing and information particular to the client’s account to reduce the path and shorten the friction to completing a transaction.

The added benefit means customers are more likely to order from your company, and potentially raise the amount and variety they’d buy from your site.

A B2B eCommerce portal also allows the consolidation of client history and sales activities in one single location, helping avoid inefficiencies and expensive mistakes due to human errors or miscommunication.

 

Conclusion

For all its complexity, the possibilities are tremendous. Winning online means taking advantage of an emerging world that combines B2C best-practices with both traditional and non-traditional B2B tactics.

For all their false comfort, significant numbers are meaningless. What matters is connecting with, listening to, and serving the faces behind B2B’s $6,7 trillion eCommerce market.

At the center of every trend listed above lies a single principle that edges on cliche: put your customer first.